Norman Graham may have to stand trial again for the 1980 rape and murder of his girlfriend, Kaye Williams. There is evidence that another man may have committed the crime.
April 02, 2018
(Photo: David R. Lutman, Special to Courier Journal)Buy Photo

When Janice Kaye Williams was found in her boyfriend’s trailer on June 30, 1980, stabbed 27 times in the chest and her throat cut nearly ear-to-ear, police immediately zeroed in on him as the killer.

Friends described her boyfriend, Norman Graham, then 33 and an itinerant iron worker, as a laid-back hippie. His only prior brush with the law was a drunk driving conviction.

In contrast, next door in the Tiny Town Trailer Park in Guthrie, Kentucky, lived a troubled teenager named Roy Wayne Dean Jr. Seven weeks after Williams was slain, he tried to choke his mother while hearing voices and was diagnosed an “active psychotic” who didn’t know right from wrong.

Dean in later years would kill two women in heinous crimes hauntingly similar to the slaughter of Williams.

But in 1980, it was Graham who was arrested for the Williams murder. With scant direct evidence tying to him to the crime, a jury in 1981 deadlocked and he went free.

The Williams murder went unsolved for 26 years, until a Kentucky State Police detective who had worked the cold case for only three months came up with new evidence that implicated Graham. In 2008 he was convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Graham served nine years before a friend, an amateur sleuth with no experience in the criminal justice system, dug up a new witness – Dean’s own sister, who said she was 13 and playing hide-and-seek in the trailer park with a cousin on the night of the murder. She said she saw Dean standing outside Graham’s trailer, blood on his T-shirt.

Dean denies raping or killing Williams, but a special judge last fall said that if a jury had considered evidence pointing to “a proven murderer and psychopath,” it likely would not have convicted Graham. The judge granted Graham a new trial and he is free on bond.

But in yet another twist to the four decade-long saga, prosecutors appealed that ruling. If they prevail, Graham could be returned to prison to serve out his time.

Now 71 and fighting multiple myeloma, Graham says that would be his death sentence.

Nude body found

The tortuous path of Commonwealth vs. Graham began in June 1980, with Jimmy Carter in the White House and the Iranian hostage crisis nearing its 280th day.

Graham and Williams had met about six months earlier at the Tiny Town Truck Stop. “She was good looking,” he remembered with a smile. They never had a cross word, he said, and had talked about moving together to Florida.

He had come to Guthrie, on the Tennessee line 160 miles southwest of Louisville, to work as a general foreman on a construction project. She was 21, had an 18-month-old daughter and worked as a driver for Frito-Lay.

“Kaye was a very kind, outgoing, loving person,” her sister, Regina Alexander, said years later. “She loved everybody.”

Kaye Williams(Photo: Kentucky New Era)

He says he left her – alive, he insists – in his trailer on the evening of June 29 and went out for the night to a couple of bars.

When he returned, he said, he found her nude body sprawled across his bed.

“All I seen was the gash on her throat and the look on her face,” he testified.

He thought she had killed herself, and went to tell another of her sisters, Judie Blick, who also lived in the trailer park.

She later testified that his hair looked wet, as if he had just showered, and police said he appeared freshly dressed and pressed. Both said he seemed too calm for the circumstances.

He also had an admittedly bad alibi: He’d run into his ex-wife, got drunk and was passed out in his car in the parking lot of the Red Carpet Lounge in Clarksville from 9:30 p.m. until 4:30 the next morning. Nobody could vouch for him, though, and a waitress testified she didn’t see his maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass when she left work at 2:30 a.m.

“It was the only thing I could tell them, because it was the truth,” Graham said recently.

Commonwealth Attorney Jesse Riley thought he was heading towards a conviction in that first trial. But there was no forensic evidence linking Graham to the crime. His folding knife came back clean, and an expert said it hasn’t been washed recently. The bloody clothes he presumably wore never were found.

The jurors deliberated nearly eight hours but deadlocked. The court declared a mistrial.

“My attorney said that a mistrial is like kissing your sister,” Graham remembered, “but at least you get a kiss.”

He said another attorney warned him that prosecutors could bring back the charges but predicted they would never do so.

Graham never again set foot in his trailer. He traveled from state to state over the years, chasing construction jobs, trying to forget. He stayed out of trouble, other than a second DUI.

“I moved on with my life,” he said. “I had some happy years.”

The psycho next door

The same could not be said for Roy Wayne Dean Jr.

According to court papers, his parents whisked him away from Tiny Town Trailer Park the day after the Williams murder.

And on Aug. 18 that year, after he choked his mother, his family took him to Pennyroyal Center in Hopkinsville, where Dr. Arthur Burrows Jr. wrote that he was “actively psychotic and had, no doubt, been so for several weeks.”

His family said he hadn't been right since a relative accidentally sank an ax into his head when he was 10. Dean once told a psychiatrist at Jennie Stewart Hospital that he had hallucinations of monsters and pigs, and felt “like someone is controlling him.”

He married in 1983 and his wife, Tina Rigsby Ellis, a dietician, said he continued to act strangely. Once when fishing he caught a catfish and mutilated it with his hunting knife.

Roy Wayne Dean(Photo: Kentucky Corrections Department)

“He just kept stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and laughing and stabbing,” she later testified.

She said she thought Dean was a thief because she found women’s rings in his pockets, and that she saw scratches and blood on his wrists, as if he had stolen them by force.

And she said he described the scene of Williams’ murder in such detail he must have been “the perpetrator of the crime.”

On Aug. 9, 1984, Dean murdered Dee Ann Rapp, 36, a housewife whose partially nude body was found behind a dumpster in Clarksville, Tennessee. She had been shot repeatedly in the head.

On Sept. 27 that year, he fired seven bullets into the head of Brenda Church, 43, also a housewife, and one in her chest. Church, who lived in Todd County and was married to a man for whom Dean worked as a tobacco hand, was found nude and, like Williams, with her hands tied behind her back.

Ellis said that when she and her family visited Dean in jail, he asked, “Daddy, didn’t I kill something in Tiny Town once?” to which his father replied, “Yeah, son, but that was dogs.”

"Dogs, hell," his grandmother muttered as they family was leaving, Ellis said.

Dean was sentenced to death for Church’s murder – “one of the most brutal and sadistic ever committed in this area,” Prosecutor Riley told the jury. When Dean's capital sentence was reversed, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole for 25 years. He also pleaded guilty to Rapp's murder in Tennessee, for which he was ordered to serve time concurrently with his Kentucky sentence.

He was so dangerous – Riley said Dean is suspected of killing two more women – that the prosecutor twice appeared before the parole board to beg that he never be released from prison.

“He was definitely a bad actor,” Riley said.

The similarities between the murders of Williams, Church and Rapp did not go unnoticed.

In 2001, a former police chief in Elkton, about 20 miles north of Guthrie, asked KSP Detective Brad Stevenson to compare the two Kentucky crimes.

Stevenson noted in a report that both victims were found nude with their hands behind their back, both posed with legs spread, and both were victims of “overkill” — Williams by knife and Church by gun.

In 2003, a newly available forensic test determined semen found on Williams’ jump suit matched Graham’s DNA. But that in itself should have been meaningless — Graham said all along that he and his girlfriend had sex the morning before she was killed.

In five years on the case, Stevenson sought no charges.

That all changed when a new KSP detective, Steve Silfies, took up the case. Three months later he persuaded a grand jury to indict Graham a second time.

Graham was 500 miles away, in Danville, Virginia, on Jan. 10, 2007, and had just gotten out of the shower when a fugitive apprehension team kicked in his door. He protested that he was innocent, but he was brought back to Kentucky for a second trial.

On trial for murder

This time, there was a new commonwealth’s attorney, Gail Guiling, and a new star witness, William's younger sister, Regina Alexander, who was 17 at the time of the crime.

Alexander, located by Silfies, testified that Kaye told her earlier on the day of the murder that her relationship with Graham was on the rocks.

And she said her sister was a neat freak who bathed as often as three times a day and changed her clothes nearly as often. She said Kaye changed her clothes on the afternoon before she was killed – after she and Graham had sex that morning.

Norman Graham, 2007 mugshot(Photo: Christian County Jail)

Guiling told the jury that meant the semen was placed on the jumpsuit later that night – when Graham raped and murder her.

Another prosecutor, Joe Ross, speculated that Graham came home to the trailer smelling of his ex-wife’s perfume; that Williams told him she was going to break up with him; and he brutally attacked her.

Poking an additional hole in Graham’s weak alibi, the Todd County sheriff testified that Graham's car was covered with dew when police arrived that morning, showing he was home longer than he’d claimed, with ample time to kill Williams.

Graham’s lawyer, Carol Winfield Johnson, who was 66 and ailing, tried to persuade jurors that someone else committed the grievous crime. He pointed to Dean and two other Tiny Town residents, one a convicted rapist, the other a convicted child molester.

But only Graham’s DNA was a match.

“This beautiful woman’s … death has gone unsolved long enough,” Ross told the jury in his closing argument. “The only man who could have done this was Norman Graham.”

Twenty-eight years after the crime, he was convicted.

Kentucky Innocence Project

Graham was eligible for parole after serving just eight years of his 40-year sentence, but only if he would admit to the rape, which would have qualified him for a sex offender class required for an early release.

But he refused.

“I was innocent,” he said.

He survived a 2009 prison riot at Northpoint Training Center and quietly did his time, working as a janitor and telling every inmate he met that he wasn’t guilty. Of course most of them said the same, he recalled.

But he vowed to his family — and himself — that he wouldn’t quit fighting until he quit breathing.

And he found an unexpected ally in Lisa Potter, a friend of his second ex-wife and a fellow Harley-Davison lover with whom he liked to ride.

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Norman Graham's friend, Lisa Potter, has been trying to clear him since a jury found him guilty of the 1980 rape and murder of his girlfriend, Kaye Williams. Graham's verdict was overturned by a judge and he was granted a new trial. Potter believes she has evidence that another man may have committed the crime.
April 02, 2018
(Photo: David R. Lutman, Special to Courier Journal)

Potter didn’t know the first thing about the law, and she was "rough around the edges," as one of Graham's lawyers later described her. Determined to help her friend, she played hardball with potential witness, showing them horrendous crime scene photos, for example, from the murders of Williams and Church to elicit their sympathy and cooperation.

But she persuaded the Kentucky Innocence Project to take up Graham’s case. And in her own investigation, she found the mother lode: Roy Wayne’s sister.

As a child, Renee Dean feared her brother. He once broke her arm, and another time chased her across a field with his car. She hadn't told anyone what she saw, fearing he might someday be released and exact revenge.

But when Potter showed her that her brother had been given a Parole Board “serve out," meaning he’d never be released, she agreed to go on the record.

“I said 'please do the right thing,' and she did,” Potter remembers.

Renee Dean told how she’d seen her brother outside Graham’s trailer, his shirt covered with blood. When she asked what he was doing, he shushed her and ran away. And back at their family trailer, she saw that his hand was cut and bloodied.

The Kentucky Innocence Project found other witnesses, including Renee’s cousin, Barbara Keaton, who’d been playing with Renee. She said she saw Roy Wayne run away with no shirt on and throw a boot into a dumpster.

Yet another witness, Danny Moles, who was a friend of Graham's but also related to the Dean family, said Roy Wayne Sr. told him the teenager came with bloody clothes the night of the murder and that he helped dispose of them.

Graham’s lawyers, Melanie Foote and Amy Robinson Staples with the Department of Public Advocacy's Kentucky Innocence Project, moved for a new trial.

Prosecutors insisted that it was too late for Graham to offer new evidence. Guiling and her assistant, Justin Crocker, argued that the cousins hated Roy Wayne, an easy target locked away in prison, and were exacting revenge on him.

But Special Judge Kelly Easton decided the testimony was timely. He concluded the cousins had good reason not to come forward earlier: Both testified Dean had assaulted them as children and threatened them as well. Keaton said he once left them a tape-recorded message that he would “rape us all and cut us up like pigs.”

Easton said Graham’s witnesses were hardly perfect; there were inconsistencies in their statements and Potter's investigative methods were questionable. But the judge said he believed them.

“This case presents a truly extraordinary situation,” he wrote in a 19-page opinion. “Two witnesses swear they saw an alternate perpetrator, Dean, who was known to live in the vicinity. They saw him near the crime scene on the night of the murder and describe his appearance and conduct in such a way as to strongly suggest his participation in the murder. Dean later committed at least two murders with at least some disturbing similarity to the murder in this case… He is a proven murderer and psychopath.”

On Oct. 5 last year, Easton granted Graham a new trial. After posting a small bond, he was free. The first thing he did was buy cigarettes. Then he went out for a steak with his lawyers and investigators.

Ironically, on the very same day, Guiling was herself indicted, along with her husband and eight others, on a charge of engaging in organized crime, allegedly for running a theft ring that sold stolen goods in Logan County. She also was charged with tampering with evidence and official misconduct.

Crocker, her former assistant who is the interim commonwealth’s attorney, appealed the new trial order to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, where it is pending. In an interview, he said he still thinks Graham is guilty and hopes the attorney general’s office, which handles appeals in criminal cases, fights to reverse the order.

Crocker concedes Dean is a dangerous killer, but says Dean had no reason not to admit killing Williams if he had done so.

“My family has been forced to relive the death of my sister, repeatedly, since 1980, and it has been traumatizing.”

Regina Alexander, Kaye Williams' sister

“We feel strongly that the jury got it right,” Crocker said.

If Graham wins on appeal, he would have to defend himself in a new trial. But Alexander, the victim’s sister, has filed an affidavit saying she wants the case dismissed.

“My family has been forced to relive the death of my sister, repeatedly, since 1980, and it has been traumatizing,” she said in a sworn statement.

Foote also wants the appeal dismissed, as Attorney General Andy Beshear’s office did in two recent cases in which the state Innocence Project contended that defendants were wrongly convicted. One of those cases was prosecuted by Guiling.

Foote said Guiling should never have retried Graham in 2008.

“There was not enough new evidence to justify putting a man’s life at risk,” she said.

She said the state Innocence Project's thorough investigation shows Dean was the killer, and his denial is insignificant, given that he still denies killing Rapp in Tennessee even though he plead guilty to her murder.

Graham, who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer, in 2014 while in prison, lives in on Social Security in a house in Guthrie that Potter found for him.

He is remarkably magnanimous, considering the hand he’s been dealt. He says he is only angry at Ross, the former assistant commonwealth’s story, for weaving the theory that Kaye turned on him because he came home smelling of another woman’s perfume.

“How could a man fabricate a story like that with no proof?” he asked.

Headstone for Faye Williams(Photo: Kentucky New Era)

POSTSCRIPT :

Gail Guiling pleaded not guilty to all charges. She remains commonwealth attorney and is still being paid but is disqualified from prosecuting cases and is not running for re-election. She did not respond to requests for comment on Graham’s case.

Joe Ross, now Logan County Attorney, said he didn’t feel comfortable commenting Graham’s guilt or innocence because the case could go to a jury again.

Roy Dean Sr. died last year just days before he was to testify about disposing his son’s bloody clothes.

Kentucky State Police Detective Steve Silfies died last May, shortly before he was to testify.

Former Commonwealth’s Attorney Jesse Riley, 83, is now retired. He said he still thinks Graham was guilty.

Tiny Town Trailer Park is now called Creekside Meadows.

Roy Wayne Dean Jr., 56, declined multiple interview requests. He has been in state custody since 1985 and is classified as a high-risk inmate at the Kentucky State Reformatory.